Help! I Can’t Stop Writing!

Plus, we’ll talk about teachers grading their speech and how to make the most of these posts

Photo by Pereanu Sebastian on Unsplash

"I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket." Ernest Hemingway

I feel like a drug addict or alcoholic. I can’t give up writing. I should be in the final stages of editing my book, but it just keeps growing and growing.

Any aspiring writer has a dilemma when writing their first book. The same applies to a band or singer making their first album. Do I put all of my best material – my best advice, my best stories, my funniest jokes – in the first book? Does the band put all of its best songs on the first album? Or do we save some good material for our second efforts?

I face the same dilemma while teaching: do I use all my best material – the best activities, videos, grammar exercises, games – right away for this particular topic or grammar point? Or do I save a few for later?

Children and teenagers can be a bit harder to motivate at times, so you want to have a range and variety of fun and stimulating activities. If you use the best stuff right away to wow them and get them really engaged, then you risk running out of material for the subsequent classes and it’s all a bit downhill after that. But if you save the good stuff for too long, you run the risk of exhausting their interest and might run out of steam a couple of weeks later.

I hope the book analogy is pretty clear. I have some stories I like and am eager to share, and I have some advice on how to be a better learner that I think readers will appreciate, but the challenge is in finding that right balance between wowing your readers or blowing your listeners away (for a musician) versus saving some good stuff for your next effort.

What if there is no second book?

I should have learned my lesson by now – so many times in the classroom, I’ve saved some of the best things for later, and later never came.

Perhaps the question boils down to this: am I an optimist or a pessimist?

I suppose if I forget anything important, I can always save it for the second book.

Grading your speech

Fellow teachers understand the idea of grading their speech perfectly well. What does this mean for a student?

If I were a cruel and cynical teacher, I would say it means dumbing down my language to a level my students understand.

But that’s a terribly unkind thing to say. Rather, I should say that it means teachers speak using language understandable for your level. This way you can improve your listening skills without being overwhelmed by too many unknown words. I wouldn’t be able to speak to a class of elementary (A1) students in the same way that I speak to my friends. Otherwise, their heads would explode and they wouldn’t know what the hell was going on:

“Alright class, how’s it hanging, what’ve you been up to Artem, any shenanigans lately, or just getting up to no good as usual, eh?”

Artem: [staring blankly…]

Translation: “Hi class, how are you? Artem, what did you do last night? Anything fun or crazy? Were you a good boy?

You get the idea.

In real life, obviously, ordinary people don’t necessarily grade their speech for your benefit, unless they’re kind and patient. When I go to the chemist’s or a supermarket in a foreign country and they can see that I don’t speak the language, if they’re sympathetic and understanding, they might simplify their speech. But very often, they don’t, and continue to jabber away at me when all I really want to do is get my medicine and get the hell out of there.

As students progress through the levels, teachers grade their speech less and less, and speak to you fairly naturally. In fact, I grade my speech in a different way: I intentionally use bigger words that I think my students can handle, or that are a part of the lesson, or what we call the target language of the lesson. That way they can hopefully notice the words as they are used, and the more I use them, ideally the easier it will be for the students to use them too (in theory).

But still, every teacher, to an extent, has to grade their speech. In real life – shame on me – I swear way too much in front of family or friends. I can’t speak like that with my students now, can I?

(Don’t answer that.)

For example, let’s say this particular post is a ‘lesson’, and my focus is vocabulary: multi-word or phrasal verbs – every student’s favourite topic!

It would be unfair of me, during a normal lesson, to get halfway through it and then say to my students, “oh by the way, today we’re learning phrasal verbs, have you noticed me using any so far?” Some students probably will have noticed, but not all. It pays to be attentive.

Okay, now go back to the start and see how many phrasal verbs you can find. I’ll wait for a minute or two for you to do that…

-------------------------------

Right, now that you’re back, how many did you find?

Here they are: (unless I missed one or two?)

I can’t give up writing.

…then you risk running out of material…and might run out of steam…

…blowing your listeners away…

…the question boils down to this…

…it means dumbing down my language…(a-ha! Do you see? I wasn’t insulting anyone earlier, that was just my backhanded way of introducing you to a new phrasal verb)

…what the hell was going on…

…what’ve you been up to…?

…or just getting up to no good…

…continue to jabber away at me…

… and get the hell out of there.

Two of them – be[en] up to and get[ting] up to no good – also function like idioms, but I’ve included them here because they have the same structure (verb + particle, either a preposition or an adverb) and whatever they are, they are still worth noticing.

How to make the most of these posts

I know that not everyone enjoys reading as much as I do, so I’m aiming to make these not only as informative and insightful as possible, but also entertaining. You be the judge of how well I accomplish these aims.

By design, I will grade my speech, but in a way beneficial to my readers. I’m definitely not dumbing down my language – oh, no – but I certainly can’t write the way I’d write to some of my friends. Or the way I kicked off my first blog, in February 2009 from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan:

“As a self-professed Luddite who has never really got round to embracing the blogosphere in any great depth, I feel as though what I’m about to embark upon is anathema to everything I stand for.”

That was only the opening sentence – don’t go reading any further, trust me.

That sentence might not even be that difficult for many of you, on its own. But it’s not an easy sentence, and if most sentences were written in such a manner, it wouldn’t be long before you started to lose motivation and find it too much of a struggle. And it would be fine if were around 1,000 words, but it was close to 2,500. That’s mentally taxing.

After my first few posts, a couple of my former students from Latvia – where I taught until June 2008 – wrote to me to say “please simplify your language!”

And they were advanced (C1) learners.

Rereading some of my old posts, I honestly don’t know whether my first attempts at online writing were good or not. There are some posts I’m proud of and others that are just downright cringeworthy.

In the meantime, with these posts, you can either take it easy and read them for what they are: something informative and perhaps something illuminating. Use it to keep your reading skills somewhat fresh.

Or you can use it as a vocabulary challenge, noticing the new language that’s used – if there is any new language for you – and see if you can work out the meaning from context. Were you able to figure out, for example, what jabber away means?

It’s always a good idea to read everything first to get the main idea – or gist – of it. Then you can go back and have some fun with the vocabulary.

And read carefully, between the lines. Sometimes I’ll do sinister things like this:

‘If you use the best stuff right away…then you risk running out of material for the subsequent classes. But if you save the good stuff, you run the risk of exhausting their interest and might run out of steam a couple of weeks later.

Do you see what I’ve done there? I’ve used risk as a verb and a noun (in an idiom) – at times you might have to pay close attention to these sorts of things.

And did you know that you can run out of steam? We can run out of many things: time, money, energy, patience, beer, petrol, ideas, inspiration…

In my book I get into a lot more detail about guessing meaning from context.

Help! Is anyone an artist?

I need your help. Are there any artist types among my readers who would be interested in designing my book cover? If so, get in touch and we’ll talk.

And a big thank you to my ‘team of editors’ who have been so kindly providing feedback and insights on my book. I think for their sake, I need to stop writing so I don’t keep pestering them with requests for more feedback.

If you missed the first Welcome post, be a good boy or girl and go and read that now.

And if you don’t want to run the risk of missing any of these posts – or rather, my ramblings – then subscribe and you’ll get this delivered to your inbox whenever inspiration strikes.